John Sterrett is very active within the SQL Server community. He is a PASS Regional Mentor for the South Central Region, co-founded the West Virginia SQL Server User Group and hosted two PASS SQL Saturday events in West Virginia. John has presented at several SQL Server events including PASS SQLRally, PASS Member Summit, many PASS SQL Saturday events, code camps, and, user groups. John is a syndicated blogger at http://johnsterrett.com.

The following are five recommendations I would like to share with anyone attending the #sqlpass member summit. I hope you have a blast!

GuideBook

If you have a smart phone I highly recommend grabbing the GuideBook application for your mobile device. This will give you direct access to the session schedule, general information and more. This is a very helpful tool for being flexible and changing which session you should attend on the fly.

Buy the conference sessions

There are so many great sessions its impossible to catch them all. I strongly recommend buying the USB drive that includes all the sessions so the pressure is off to try and make sure you see them all. This will allow you to enjoy the conference without worrying about seeing the best session. Personally, this allows me to focus more on networking.

Networking

The SQL Server Community is awesome. There are so many people in the community willing help you accomplish your goals. All you have to do is meet them. There really isn’t a better place to do that than PASS Member Summit. I would never be where I am today without some of the connections I have meet at the past PASS conferences.

SQL Server Clinic

Got a problem and don’t know how to solve it? Your at the right place, not only are there tons of great DBA’s around to help, you also have the SQL team willing to help for free. This year I brought a couple interesting problems with me and I cannot wait to review them with the Microsoft support team to get their thoughts.

Vendors

Do you need more hours in the day? Do you wish there was a way to make a process easier? If so, most likely one of the many vendors at the conference has a solution for it. Time is money, so if one of these tools on display can free up your time wouldn’t you want to use it? All the major SQL Server vendors will be at the conference, hopefully spending a few minutes with them will save your hours of time next year.